The Crunchy To Alt-Right Pipeline Is Older Than You Think
Fascists have co-opted subcultures for decades.
As many of my long-time readers know, I’ve been vocal about losing people close to me to Q-Anon and the alt-right. I lost my cousin, Raja*. I lost my nudist clubkid friend.
And, more shockingly, I had to drop several of my favorite music artists because of it. What’s wilder about this is that those artists were not rock stars. They were hip hop, turntablists, and EDM artists.
Finding out that your favorite turntablists and old-school happy hardcore DJs turned out to be alt-right is disheartening, to say the least. However, it was somewhat bound to happen.
After all, there’s a known crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline. It’s actually the newest incarnation of an older trick. As someone who’s grown up in a version of it, I feel I should discuss it.
Most people are aware that there is a hippie-to-alt-right pipeline fueled by social media.
YouTube and Facebook have been caught red-handed disseminating fascist propaganda, conspiracy theories, and worse for the past 10 years. While these platforms have tamped down on this (slightly), it’s still a major problem.
This is not news. There are multiple studies showing how YouTube, in particular, has been instrumental in radicalizing people toward the right. It’s not news. The platform prefers conservative and religious material, despite it being a proven problem for society.
If you try to make a new YouTube account and search up political names, you’ll start seeing more and more alt-right names pop up on your feed. And sometimes, you might not even realize it’s right-wing until you’re halfway through a video.
For many people, seeing angry young men become alt-right superstars wasn’t shocking. They are vulnerable, lost, and to a point, they were looking for someone to blame. It was a match made in heaven — er, hell.
However, that didn’t explain all the yoga-loving, naturist types who fell down the rabbit hole, does it?
What took most people by surprise was the jaw-dropping change people saw among people who were once staunch hippies.
And by hippies, I mean they were granola-chomping, peace-loving, spiritual people who often were at the front lines of Pride during the early 2000s.
This is particularly true when you see the women who get into alt-right messaging. The alt-right started to co-opt pastel colors, hippie aesthetics, and even New Age spirituality to get women to buy into it.
This particular pipeline is known as “pastel Q” or “crunchy mom Q.” If you’ve seen spiritual content creators talking about how it’s “divine feminine” to submit to your spouse and avoid birth control, you’ve seen pastel Q content.
For many people, it’s a shock to see women who were once all about Gaia turn into frothing “save the children” lunatics. I’ll admit, it still shocks me to find out who ends up in that pipeline.
What most people don’t realize is that this isn’t just an internet trend. The hippie-to-right-wing pipeline has been doing this for ages.
It started with the 60's hippie and punk movements.
So, remember when I said I was partly raised by people in a cult? Yep. My best friend's parents were about as hippie-like as you could get. Her mom was a very free, crunchy artist who spent most of her day painting and glassblowing.
Her dad, stoic like mine was, would often just hang out with my dad, talk software, and then play banjo. He also rode a unicycle and taught us how to jump on pogo sticks. Her family had pet rabbits for fun and we would sword fight/face paint for fun.
Oh, and the Beatles were our daily music.
Yet, make no mistake about it, they’re super right-wing. My dad used to joke about being a “stealth conservative” because he had a long beard and looked like a hippie. We were not unusual in this sense.
As it turns out, conservatives with ulterior motives have been doing this since the 60s and 70s. Co-opting rebellion as a way of making fascism cool has been a historically successful endeavor — at least temporarily.
After the war, Nazis co-opted subversion through the 70s punk scene.
You know that classic song, “Nazi Punks F*** Off?”
It was not just a punk rock song. It was a scream to get Nazis and white nationalists out of the punk rock movement back in the 1970s. Punk always had a Nazi sect in the time I was alive, but this wasn’t always the case.
During the 1970s, white nationalists were having an image issue. The Civil Rights movement revealed the ghastly cruelty and stupidity that comes with racism. It was true in America, but it also was wildly true abroad.
This was particularly true of the far-right players in Britain’s political scene — such as National Front. NF realized their power would fade if they didn’t rebrand. They needed to court young voters who wanted someone or something to believe in.
So, they tried to rebrand as a different type of subversive. Punk (and ska) were both music-politics movements geared toward the working class, disenfranchised people tired of being told what to do.
Punk’s culture splintered into anti-fascist/SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) and Nazi Skinheads. The unity of old punk had never quite recovered, and because punk tends to get political, it likely never will.
Of course, right-wing Christian groups also co-opted hippie culture as a way to court the youth.
During the youth years of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Christianity meant you were straight-laced, suit-wearing, white folk. And for mainstream Christianity, that was true. This was the status quo and they were part of mainstream culture.
However, the 60s and 70s were decades famous for cults. New takes on religion geared toward subverting mainstream stuffiness were everywhere: Charles Manson, Branch Davidians, and even Heaven’s Gate started around this era.
This brings me to talk about three cults that were particularly successful at this time:
Jesus Freaks. These were the hippies-turned-preachers mentioned in Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” song. They are still alive and well.
Moonies. This is the cult I grew up adjacent to, and while they aren’t white nationalists, they are far-right. Most people know them as the Cali-based cult that used to sell sunflowers and trinkets to people, often while wearing tie-dye or painted shirts. However, they also are staunch anti-communists who believe that everyone should have an AR-15.
The 12 Tribes. You might recognize this name as the cult behind “The Yellow Deli.” They are more right-wing than most Evangelical churches. At first glance, you’d never guess.
Young adults were lured in with the appearance of a wild, free, and rebellious lifestyle that featured community. What they ended up getting was something more conformist and restrictive than mainstream America.
It’s a tale as old as time. Right-wing groups use leftist aesthetics, creativity, and terms for their own purposes — often changing the original meanings of the symbols altogether.
Co-opting culture is the only way fascism stays afloat these days.
You might be wondering why so many subcultures seem to get infected by racism, alt-right crap, and conspiracy theories. Well, it’s by design. Right-wing groups will do anything to draw in more useful idiots to their cause.
No one wants to be associated with fascism, alt-right, or hateful conspiracy theories. It’s not cool. It’s not fun to be around. It does nothing but rot everything around it.
Nothing is alluring about joining a fascist culture aside from the fact that it *might* give you a weak reason to feel better than another person. Even then, that ego boost dies as soon as you realize everyone else doesn’t want anything to do with your hateful “superior” ass.
Right-wing groups know that. That’s why they co-opt terms from other cultures. That’s why they weaken and warp terms used by others to empower one another, and why they keep playing dress-up with their ideologies.
This isn’t new. This has been happening since the end of World War II. And as long as we keep calling it out, efforts to co-opt it will fail. Fascism is too weak to stand on its own, so we have to treat it like a culture parasite. It’s just that simple.
I’m loving this political side of you!
I’ve been meaning to write about the nature moms being sucked into this.
I’ve been watching this with the pagan community, too. Lots and lots of Blessed Bes who gain an entourage and go full right-wing cult leader before you know it, usually at the recommendation of a “mentor” who’s been driven out of other pagan groups because they don’t even try to hide the swastikas.